University of Minnesota Press Cultural Critique

NO PLACE LIKE IDEOLOGY (ON SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK): IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE
THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF INTERPRETATION?

Author(s): Petar Ramadanovic
Source: Cultural Critique, Vol. 86 (Winter 2014), pp. 119-138
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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No Place Like Ideology (On Slavoj ŽiŽek)
Is There a Difference between the Theory of Ideology and
the Theory of Interpretation?
Petar Ramadanovic
For Emil Hrvatin, a.k.a. Janez Jan�a
A cross literary studies, the accepted view is that ideology is not

only a speciWc belief system but also, to borrow from an old favorite,
“the very condition of our experience of the world” (Belsey, 4). Since
the 1950s, we have moved from regarding ideology as a form of false
consciousness to the idea that there is no way out of ideology. Today,
we believe that, as another favorite has it, “stepping out of it” is “the
very form of our enslavement to” ideology (Êiêek 1994, 6). This develop-
ment follows the predictable paradigm switch from content to form,
from interpellation to enunciation, from structuralism to poststructur-
alism. Still, despite the obvious progression, and despite the fact that
there are works that seem to explain ideology in a manner that is all
but deWnitive, I want to return to some basic issues.
The questions I want to revisit concern not ideology as such (as
we will see, when we move beyond a certain position with Louis
Althusser, there is no ideology as such) but the discourse on ideology.
For instance, what exactly is the position from which a claim like the
one above (that ideology has no limit or outside) can be made?
Or what happens when we apply the theory of ideology to itself?
(If we cannot step outside ideology, can this theory be applied to itself
and take itself as what Lacan would call the position of enunciation?)
Or, to ask the same question yet another way, can there be a dis-
cursive formation that replicates itself without change ad inWnitum?
I am, as you can see, interested in the limit that is constitutive of
ideology. My real motivation, however, comes from a rather stubborn
personal failure to accept what the theory of ideology has been telling
us for the past twenty years, namely, that, in Robert Pfaller’s words,
“[i]deology does not have an outside: the void is still an identity, and
Cultural Critique 86—Winter 2014—Copyright 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota

120 Petar Ramadanovic
a ‘zero-interpellation,’ an ‘interpellation beyond interpellation,’ is still

an interpellation” (241). I am not so sure that this is the case. If, with
deconstruction, we assume that systems of meaning are open (and not
only incomplete), it cannot be the case in a literal sense, since open
systems do away with the inside/outside dichotomy. And why not go
a step further? It appears equally plausible that after we open the
theory of ideology and realize that there is no outside, ideology van-
ishes into thin air. Given my deconstructive beliefs, I am also skeptical
about recent interpretations of Slavoj Êiêek’s work—Êiêek being,
according to widely accepted opinion, the preeminent philosopher of
ideology and, along with Judith Butler, the most prominent philoso-
pher of his generation. Even when the interpretations are “pleasingly
accurate,” to use Mathew Sharpe’s term (1), they are deWned, as is
Êiêek’s theory, in reference to a speciWc, Lacanian understanding of sig-
niWcation that relies on the assumption of a closed system with a hole
as its model. The same can be said about poststructuralist critiques of
Êiêek, which afWrm the same notion that meaning is structured around
an absence.1 (Therefore, when we think about the beyond, outside, or
otherwise than ideology, we are looking also for the beyond of a cer-
tain understanding of meaning, for a speciWc relation between theory
of ideology and theory of interpretation—a challenge not just for Êiêek
but also, as it turns out, for one entire theoretical paradigm that holds
that interpretation and ideology coincide.)2
I would like to ask, for instance, whether at a certain point empty-
ing out the meaning of the master-signiWer (the absence at the heart of
this theory of meaning, the void that is identity, and so on) becomes,
perhaps, even a form of presence. Must the process through which
meaning is created repeat itself on and on, or could our theory of ide-
ology, too, be subject to, well, process, historical changes, and the pass-
ing of time? Is outside always an outside? Could it be that the outside
is changing, too? Along the same lines, there seems to be a trajectory
that obviously follows from Êiêek’s theory of ideology—a critique of
ideology leading to discourse analysis, leading to a deconstruction of
Lacanian psychoanalysis—which ends in a characteristic (for Êiêek)
dismissal of poststructuralism and not, as we should expect, in the
deconstruction of ideology.
In order to explain my complaint and outline what kind of decon-
struction Êiêek should be subjected to, I will read closely Êiêek’s essay
no place like ideology ( on slavoj Ži Ž ek ) 121
“The Spectre of Ideology,” which introduces his collection Mapping

Ideology, published in 1994. I choose this work because it is short, con-
tained, and, with respect to his theory of ideology, complete, and it
can be reconstructed and analyzed in an essay of the usual length. By
“contained” I mean that Êiêek wrote it as a kind of summary of the
three-hundred-page Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), and published it
a year after Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of
Ideology (1993) and three years after For They Know Not What They Do
(1991), all of which dealt extensively with ideology. As a consequence,
his argument in “The Spectre of Ideology” does not drift into endless
examples but is sustained, we could even say reconstructed or aware
of itself, following what seems to be a deliberate plan. Further, in addi-
tion to being a summary of the work on ideology he had done prior to
1993, the essay also anticipates the deepening of his interest in univer-
salism and Marxism, more fully developed in works like The Ticklish
Subject (1999) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001).
Focusing on only one short essay will allow me to foreground a
dimension of Êiêek’s work, the experience of reading it, that is seldom
taken as integral to his theory of ideology. Êiêek’s commentators, in-
vested in their mastery of his discourse, tend to focus on the most salient
ideas,3 with the unfortunate effect of offering little insight into the actual
process of reading and writing through which this theory of ideology
is deWned. I will make this experience, this performance, of reading
“The Spectre of Ideology” our way into Êiêek’s theory of ideology
under the assumption that this is a proper, Êiêekian path of reading.
This is because Êiêek, as a Hegelian, offers a complete, that is to say,
dialectical, theory of ideology, which is at the same time an experience,
a theory of ideology, and a history of a theory of ideology. (Most works
on ideology combines two discourses, a theory of ideology with a per-
formance of ideology, as in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, or the history
of ideology with a theory of ideology, as in Terry Eagleton’s Criticism
and Ideology.) Now we also see in what terms, as a historical-dialectical
process, the completion of ideology takes place in Êiêek’s work, as
well as why virtually every sentence in this short introductory essay
is offered from the perspective of the “we,” which is the subject of the
experience of ideology as much as it is the subject of the text. These
characteristics make Êiêek’s study of ideology unfold as a process in a
cyclical, dialectical motion wherein subject and object, analyst and the
thing analyzed, ideology and the theory of ideology, continually ex-

change places, deWning all together a speciWc order of the signiWer that
Êiêek calls Lacanian.
The chief assumption behind this kind of process-based, or per-
formative, understanding of ideology is that once we move beyond a
neo-Marxist understanding of ideology, there are no longer stable view-
points that would be neutral or nonideological—no places from which
a critique of ideology would be just a critique. Beyond critical theory,
ideology is not a discourse, not an object, not a belief system, but a
name for the very general and very basic practice (or discourse) through
which meaning is constructed. And when we can no longer point our
Wnger at the ideologues and ideology, ideology is also nowhere, and
so everywhere.
Because I want to let this performance of the theory of ideology
unfold step by step from a naïve position, my interpretation will seem
underdeveloped, and the point of my reading of Êiêek will arrive only
gradually. SufWce it to say here that almost twenty years after its pub-
lication, “The Spectre of Ideology” appears dated by the Lacanian
theory of meaning that Êiêek insists on. For instance, it is tethered to
the notion of stepping-out-of-ideology and, with it, to a spatial model
of ideology that is deWned by the difference between an inside and an
impossible outside; by a self-sustaining system of meaning; by a belief
(that beliefs matter);4 by an understanding of metalanguage that pre-
cludes a radical examination of these discourses, and so on. As I will
argue, Êiêek’s theory is limited by a certain analytical sense of dis-
course, a notion of the domain of ideology, even as he tries to ensure
that no master-signiWer will dominate this realm, that no boundaries
are permanently drawn, that there is no outside, and so on.
History, Briefly
To make sure that we are on the same page, here is the condensed ver-
sion of the history of the theory of ideology since the last paradigm
shift that predates Êiêek—I can recommend Terry Eagleton’s Ideology,
published in 1991, because it is exhaustive and accurate up to the last
chapter and its discussion of discourse analysis, with which we will
busy ourselves here. It’s easy to understand why the generation of
neo-Marxists after World War II organized their theory of ideology

around false consciousness. Not only were they faced with totalitarian
systems—communism, Nazism—which, among other things, were
obvious deviations from socialist thought; they were also working
within the great critical tradition whose assumption was that it could
emancipate thinking from all forms of totalitarianism, including the one
perpetuated by the reason itself. Following this basic matrix, neo-
Marxists assumed that there existed a critical discourse—Theodor
Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” Althusser’s “science,” most promi-
nently—that could locate, deWne, and unmask ideology no matter how
insidious it was. The goal of critical theory was to uncover ideological
blindness and liberate us piecemeal from the totality that ideology
sought to secure. This was the goal even in such sophisticated works
as Althusser’s, which identify the phantasmatic aspects of ideology
and yet still associate it with a speciWc center, such as the state.
Then, as the end of the Cold War was approaching and globaliza-
tion got under way, as Foucault’s and Lacan’s work gained promi-
nence, the critical model no longer seemed adequate to describe what
theory had begun to perceive as the diffused and decentered condition
of ideology. The criteria that helped separate true from false beliefs,
critical from myth-producing discourses, seemed not to hold either; the
state was, for instance, challenged by special interest groups ranging
from the military-industrial complex to multinational corporations,
unions, and so on. In the 1980s, at least three French theorists—two,
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, writing together, and Etienne Bali
bar—revolutionized the theory of ideology by assuming that ideology
could be both material and, as Terry Eagleton put it, “essentially con-
cerned with meaning” (1991, 194). Under the new regime, ideology
became structural, not only representational, constitutive of meaning
and not only manifested in it, discursive, not only critical. Êiêek joined
the effort by grounding his understanding of ideology in Lacan’s the-
ory of signiWcation.
The reader should bear in mind that this diffusion of ideology, as
well as its decoupling from traditional centers of power and from the
model proposed by critical theory, is to be seen as following a general
trajectory of easing ideology’s grip on the subject as well as making
ideology omnipresent. As we move from critical theory to discourse
analysis, the “weight of ideology” diminishes (Êiêek 1994, 14), because
ideology is no longer concentrated but is distributed over a widening

“elusive network of implicit, quasi-‘spontaneous’ presuppositions and
attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of ‘non-
ideological’ (economic, legal, political, sexual . . .) practices” (15). That
ideology is diffused means, in short, that there are no more privileged
sites from which ideology is either distributed or organized or from
which it can be measured. As a consequence, every post–critical the-
ory of ideology must admit that it is ideological.5
In works like V. N. Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Lan-
guage, the theory of ideology is revolutionized through a new under-
standing of signiWcation to become also a theory of signiWcation. For
Vološinov, the sign is a “material segment of . . . reality” (11) and is
therefore as ideological as “any physical body, any instrument of pro-
duction, or any product for consumption” (9).6 Such a sign, like any
material object, “reXects and refracts another reality” (9), which “it
may distort . . . or be true to” (10). Based on such an understanding,
Vološinov clams that “[w]ithout signs, there is no ideology” (9; see also
Eagleton, 194), which for him means that ideology is a signifying as
well as a material practice. From there it is a small step to Êiêek’s ver-
sion of the theory of ideology, which holds that the Weld of signiWca-
tion and the Weld of ideology coincide and that the theory of ideology
must therefore also be the theory of interpretation.
Critical Theory
I will organize my close reading around the trope of mastery for three
reasons: Wrst, because mastering ideology was historically the goal of
theorizing, and it is the goal with which Êiêek enters his hermeneutic
endeavor; second, because of the obvious reference to the master-slave
dialectic (and Hegel), which, as Êiêek argues, is the single most impor-
tant inXuence on his Lacanian theory of ideology; and third, because
of the overwhelming sense of mastery that is a characteristic of Êiêek’s
writing and that has received ample (though not entirely apt) criti-
cism. For instance, Tim Dean notes,
Although Êiêek repeatedly points out that one can never master one’s
“own” symptom (but only enjoy it), his method nonetheless situates the
critic in a position of hermeneutic mastery over the social and cultural

symptoms he or she diagnoses. (23)7
I cannot fully agree with Dean, because in Êiêek’s work mastery is a

more complex issue than Dean allows. For instance, there are several
levels and kinds of mastery, some of which perform necessary tasks,
including working through (what appears as a structural) trauma. In
fact, in “The Spectre of Ideology,” the Wrst example of mastery we
encounter is actually its opposite, a de-mastering of what we think we
know. Right off the bat, Êiêek explains how a claim and its opposite
can both be ideological. He says that “each pole of the antagonism
[between the two chief ideologies of our day, universalist cosmopoli-
tanism and populism-communitarianism] is inherent in its opposite,
so that we stumble upon it at the very moment when we endeavor to
grasp the opposite pole for itself” (1994, 3). Êiêek thus counsels liberal
democrats to turn an analytic gaze upon themselves in order to make
their critical discourse more effective.
In order to combat these new forms of organicist populism effectively one

must, as it were, turn the critical gaze back upon oneself and submit to
critical scrutiny liberal-democratic universalism itself—what opens up
the space for the organicist populism is the weak point, the “falsity,” of
this very universalism. (3)
As a result of self-scrutiny, both the concept of ideology and we who

are examining it appear dislocated and unmoored from the world of
certain political positions that initially offered an easy anchor and
thereby an easy identiWcation of all political identities, including the
criteria for distinguishing between the so-called dominant ideologies
and political activism. Without such a discovery of how our critical ap-
proach is limited in deWning ideology as well as implicated in it, we
would be doomed to endless mirroring confrontation modeled on the
Cold War, never getting any further.
Next comes a warning that signals an end to one cycle in the argu-
ment. The critique of ideology does not lead us to master ideology, but
only to master or unmask certain beliefs. Êiêek’s warning comes in
the form of a rhetorical question: “are we, the speaking subjects, not
always-already engaged in recounting the circumstances that predeter-
mine the space of our activity?” (1994, 5). This it to say that to the subject
assumed by critical theory (a self-constituted subject), Êiêek adds the

notion of the subject who cannot take full stock of itself and for this
reason is not whole.
The key process in the production of this subject is identiWed as a
part of Freud’s dream analysis. As Êiêek explains what seems to be one
of his essay’s chief ideas, the goal of a psychoanalytic theory of ideol-
ogy (as opposed to critical theory) is to determine why a given con-
tent—both manifest and latent—has assumed a particular form.8 Only
this kind of analysis brings into consideration what is unconscious or
excluded from the dream work (and is not merely latent). To critical
theory we thus add a step that centers “our attention on . . . the dream-
work to which the ‘latent dream-thoughts’ were submitted,” and away
from the fascination with the “hidden meaning” of the dream (2008, 7).
(Êiêek goes on to show that we can Wnd an equivalent theory in Marx’s
understanding of commodity fetishism, which also centers on the form
and on the transformation, not on the results of these processes or their
latent elements.)
An ideology is then deWned (in what we can call a second step) as
a discourse whose “very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must
remain concealed if it is to be effective” (1994, 8). Ideology functions in a
twofold way, not only promulgating a system of values but doing so
in ways whose effectiveness depends on the concealment of its con-
tent. Ideology deWnes relations but is not deWned in them, requiring a
new strategy for its identiWcation so that a theory of ideology has to
focus on the “process by means of which the hidden meaning disguised
itself” (2008, 8).
Here we can see rather clearly why critical theory, including its
critical method, has become insufWcient. Critical theory is itself a method
for hiding one (unconscious) sense of ideology, while disclosing and
analyzing another. We can, for instance, write about ideology in an essay
and simultaneously achieve two goals. On the one hand, we reveal
critical knowledge about how to identify ideology. On the other, we
draw the readers, our students, for instance, into speciWc practices and
mechanisms that legitimate current forms of the distribution of power,
a system in which the author of the essay has the role of the master or
leader, which is an order to which the reader must consent if she is to
learn critical theory. (And we can do it while also proclaiming the death
of the author, the university in ruins, and so on.)
Discourse Analysis
After our theory of ideology has identiWed the duality of ideology, mat-
ters get really complicated. Exactly why this complication arises can
be deduced from Êiêek’s recognition, following Oswald Ducrot’s “the-
ory of argumentation,” that “a successful argumentation presupposes
the invisibility of the mechanisms that regulate its efWciency” (1994,
11). This is to say that we are necessarily speaking from the position of
a theory of ideology that is also a practice of ideology, a theory whose
goal is not only to reveal but also to draw subjects in, since interpella-
tion is the condition of its effectiveness.
In addition, when we move from critical theory to Êiêek’s analysis,
we are also adding the assumption that ideology is not Wrst a practice
or relation of domination but a concept. Now, the presence of ideol-
ogy is deduced not directly from its presence or from its effects but
from the conceptual expectation that we will Wnd ideology. And so what
we Wnd when doing discourse analysis is ideology—is ideology by deW-
nition. Êiêek does not, unfortunately, go right on to explain the mech-
anisms behind his Lacanian theory, speciWcally to identify and explain
these expectations we have when we look as Lacanians at a scene or a
Weld of signiWcation. Instead, he allows the cyclical process of his argu-
ment to start with the history of the deployment of psychoanalysis to
understand ideology and its beginnings in Roland Barthes’s work.
With Barthes’s Mythologies, Êiêek concludes that the representa-
tion of nature follows a principle that reiWes “the results of discursive
procedures into properties of the ‘thing itself.’” With Paul de Man, he
speaks of a “denaturalization” that results from deconstruction, to make
the general point, with Ducrot, that “one cannot draw a clear line of
separation between descriptive and argumentative levels of language.”
According to Ducrot, all descriptions are moments “of some argumen-
tative scheme,” which may or may not be conscious (Êiêek 1994, 11).
The invisible “mechanisms that regulate” the “efWciency” of Êiêek’s
own discourse will be identiWed a bit later, as a system that functions
without an essence or kernel (1994, 17), which will also be the Wnal
conclusion of Êiêek’s theory of ideology. Before we get there, however,
the experience of the ideology of theory (I mean this contradictory or
double task of analysis) must be completed. We are now building up
to the kind of mastery that Tim Dean and others complain about.
The unwillingness to disclose the hidden mechanism or the rule

his analysis follows is only one of the rhetorical tricks Êiêek employs
toward a goal that we can now identify for what it is—not a symptom,
but symbolic domination.
Ideology is a systematically distorted communication: a text in which under
the inXuence of unavowed social interests (of domination, etc.), a gap
separates its “ofWcial,” public meaning from its actual intention—that is
to say, in which we are dealing with an unreXected tension between the
explicit enunciated content of the text and its pragmatic presuppositions.
(1994, 10)
The more pervasive device in Êiêek’s writing is a kind of sleight of

hand, what Rex Butler calls a “reversal” (38), which, in “The Spectre of
Ideology,” happens most obviously on page 8. There, out of the blue,
comes the claim that everything Êiêek has explained up to that point, in
the previous eight pages, is a kind of “implicit pre-comprehension” of
ideology, a description of what we believe ideology to be, not a system-
atized knowledge about it. This one remark is, of course, all he says
about the change from “doxa to truth” (1994, 8), as if the turn from
belief to knowledge were not the key to understanding a theory of ide-
ology as well as its history and its practice. After such a betrayal—after
such a point de capiton!—Êiêek is in a position of total control. His autho-
rial voice is now entirely unmoored from any criteria or system of val-
ues or position that the reader can identify independently of the author.
As if the reader were in a detective novel, she is reduced to a subject
entirely deWned by the author. This reduction opens the subject to
manipulations and seems to be the condition, from Êiêek’s perspective,
for experience in general, and for the experience of ideology as a form
of symbolization in particular. So we see how the subject of ideology is
produced from the outside (of the subject-to-be), through an assumed
agreement to participate in a certain symbolic system. We see why the
subject’s relation to ideology is deWned along the lines of enslavement
and mastery—because, again, ideology is in a domain outside the-
subject-to-be, and the subject can enter this relation only as an object.
The Effect
Êiêek did not invent this style of writing. He only perfected what was
originally called the turnstile effect in Barthes’s Mythologies, which is
a kind of exuberant or exorbitant style shared by many French authors

of the period. I will go over the basics, which are no longer as obvious
as they were when Barthes formulated them. The chief point of Barthes’s
discourse analysis is to explain what we take for granted, why in liter-
ary studies we see an image (or any other constructed or manufactured
object) as a text. To understand an image this way means that we rec-
ognize that a pictorial representation was, precisely, manufactured,
meaning that it contains “a material which has already been worked
on so as to make it suitable for communication” (Barthes,110). Barthes’s
reading of the front page of the weekly Paris Match—an image saying,
according to Barthes, that “France is a great Empire, that all her sons,
without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her Xag, and
that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors”
(116)—is not produced as such by the history of French colonialism
but through the assumption on the part of the interpreter that what he
sees is a narrative, a text, and not a mere image. The Wrst step in the
process of interpretation is thus the selection of a way of seeing the
image (namely, as a text). Then, in the second step, Barthes offers his
description, or a literal rendition, of what we see, to build on the expla-
nation further and to show how ideology distorts and simpliWes history
(121), the goal of his interpretation being to “restore” the ambiguity of
the image (125).
But ambiguity is always relative and never a constant; it can never
be restored fully. (We should also bear in mind that Barthes, in the man-
ner of a psychoanalyst, put the literal description together. And so it
was Barthes—not Paris Match or the French colonialism it represents—
who simpliWed whatever there was to simplify in the Wrst place. There-
fore, it is now Barthes who appears as the author of an ideology he
wants to demystify.) Because of what he wants to achieve, Barthes’s
interpretation has to become a strategy of ever-changing manipula-
tions. The effects of these subversions are at least two: the sense of the
endlessness of interpretation and a disorientation, both captured well
in the turnstile metaphor Barthes uses to describe how myth (but also
demystiWcation) works—“the signiWcation of the myth is constituted
by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the
meaning of the signiWer and its form, a language object and a metalan-
guage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness” (122).9
The point of writing is to subvert or challenge the speaking posi-

tion so that not even the author himself can tell who is speaking or
what position the utterance comes from. (This form of subversion should
count among the ways in which the author dies.) The confusion should
conWne the process of interpellation, since we cannot know who is
answering either. It should also introduce a sense of indeterminacy,
chance, and ambiguity back into the text, which, again, cannot be done
as a lasting effect. For Êiêek—as opposed to Barthes, whose contribu-
tion ends with this disorientation—being aware of this vertigo of inter-
pretation is the moment of transition from doxa into knowledge, which
we will call the third step in the process of interpretation.
Definitions
As a sort of culmination of the experience, after we have tangled our-

selves into an argument about ideology, learned of the contradictory
goals of its theory, and reached the point at which the ideology of the-
ory has this disorienting effect on us, exactly halfway through “The
Spectre of Ideology,” we are Wnally primed for two Wnal conclusions.
The Wrst will deWne ideology; the second, the more important one, will
deWne the theory of ideology. The conclusions are given at this middle
point in the essay for strategic reasons, allowing Êiêek enough time to
set them up, and then, after they are deWned, during the dénouement,
to put them into perspective. Such additional commentary is neces-
sary because the contradictory move that we have been warned about
again and again continues to threaten us—“Here, however, one should
be careful to avoid the last trap that makes us slide into ideology under
the guise of stepping out of it” (1994, 17).10
To highlight the danger, Êiêek gives his Wrst conclusion in the form
of a question. Having been warned enough, I will proceed with a posi-
tive claim: it is indeed inherently impossible to isolate “a reality whose
consistency is not maintained by ideological mechanisms, a reality
that does not disintegrate the moment we subtract from it its ideo-
logical component” (1994, 15–16). The meaning of such a claim is basic
for discourse analysis and its view that ideology and reality support
each other. As Êiêek puts it, the “order of discourse as such is inher-
ently ‘ideological’” (16).
If this is the case, if the reality-ideology structure is continuous

(meaning also, if it has no outside), the question becomes how it is put
and held together by the theory of ideology that brought the view
about. For his explanation, Êiêek goes to Lacan and his theory of sig-
niWcation. The idea behind it is that the meaning of the entire system
depends on a notion—the empty place, the master-signiWer, the “sig-
niWer without signiWed” (17)—whose own meaning cannot be speci-
Wed. In metaphysical structures, a functionally similar central role is
performed by the concept of essence; in a symbolic structure, deity is
everything, nothing, and anything at the same time.
Now that we know what ideology is and how the systems or
domains of meaning function as structured around an empty place—a
whatever, if in this context we can borrow from Giorgio Agamben—
we are ready for the second conclusion and the deWnition of what the
theory of ideology (as opposed to ideology) is. The revelation comes
as a culmination of the process that brought us gradually closer and
closer to the heart of the structure. Êiêek says, “it is possible to assume
a place that enables us to maintain a distance from” ideology, “but this
place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be
occupied by any positively determined reality” (1994, 17). After such an
insight, the goal of the theory of ideology is to keep the place of the sig-
niWer empty, not Wll it with speciWc content. Because, again, if we “yield
to this temptation”—if we Wnd any stable place, or if, say, we believe
that our goal is equality, if we construct a new master-signiWer—we
“are back in ideology” (17).
To determine how this empty place can be protected and how dis-
course analysis can be maintained, Êiêek devotes the rest of the essay
to the Lacanian understanding of symbolization (as a key part of his
theory of interpretation). As we know, for Lacan, symbolization is an
incomplete process, which, as Êiêek puts it, “always fails.” As a result,
something is always excluded or foreclosed from reality (1994, 21).
Once we understand that this is the case, maintaining the void is tanta
mount to having a certain understanding of how the system of meaning
works, namely, as an incomplete structure. We should expect therefore
that interpretation is also an incomplete or open process.
But we also immediately encounter a side effect of this theory. If
the place of the master-signiWer must remain empty, it can also be Wlled,
on a temporary basis, with just about any signiWer. And each time there
is a temporary signiWer, there is also a temporary completion and its

concomitant interpretation. This possibility of an endless number of
provisional master-signiWers gives structure to Êiêek’s argument (as it
did to Barthes’s reading of myth), which unfolds in a predictable addi-
tive fashion, moving from one “case” or example to the next in what
is now the trademark style that makes his theory into a series of tem-
porary closures.11 Multiplying ideology by alternating between two
states, completion and incompletion, Êiêek’s theory diffuses the impact
of ideology. As Êiêek puts it in an often-cited passage from The Ticklish
Subject,
negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture

of enthusiastic identiWcation with the Cause: negativity functions as the
condition of (im)possibility . . . that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up
space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. (154)
The result is the understanding that, in Rex Butler’s words, “the social
is essentially divided, antagonistic, unable to be given closure” (3).
Such an explanation helps us understand that the Weld of ideology is
fragmented. It also, however, functions as a unifying force in the sense
that it makes the shape and the scope of theory thinkable only in terms
of the theory of ideology. While, on the one hand, the horizon of mean-
ing is inWnitely deferred, on the other, that very deferral follows what
is by now a predictable path. The same goes for the emptying out of
the meaning of the paternal metaphor (master-signiWer), the purpose
of which is to conserve dominant place for psychoanalysis as the the-
ory of interpretation—the theory that decides what counts and how.
Incidentally, that is how we should understand the chief point of Der-
rida’s reading of Lacan in “Le facteur de la vérité,” which will serve to
recap my reading of Êiêek’s theory of ideology.
The Signifier
Derrida’s “Facteur de la vérité” concerns the materiality of the signi-

Wer, which in Lacan is treated in two ways. On the one hand, there is a
revolutionary new notion of signiWcation. The signiWer is a compound
entity that brings together form and content, function and identity,
materiality and ideology, subject and object, inside and outside, absence
and presence, and is neither one. But, on the other hand, on the level
of theory, the signiWer gets quite a different status. Theory itself becomes
the law that shapes interpretation, a rule for it. That letter—the letter
of Lacan’s theory—always reaches its destination in the closure repre-
sented by the incomplete interpretation. One of these letters has a sense
(direction, path) that Derrida agrees with, which coincides with his
notion of deferral. The other letter reaches its destination in advance,
before any scene of writing, any story, any theory, any letter is allowed
to unfold—before, in short, any event can take place.
The same happens in Êiêek’s work, where the theory of ideology
keeps the Weld of meaning together. The process the empty place makes
possible serves not only to displace the master-signiWer but also, despite
the undermining that goes on, to ensure that a beyond of ideology is
unthinkable. Given the context, going beyond ideology is accomplished
by refusing to enter this game of theoretical ins and outs and its notion
of meaning. I don’t mean to suggest that what seems to be the key
claim here—Êiêek’s version of Freud’s claim about the importance of
form (or ideology) for the unconscious—is wrong, only that it is lim-
ited because it assumes the notion of unity on which Freud’s theory of
the psyche rests. As a result, psychoanalysis should seek an even less
predictable understanding of the mind (and a more heterogeneous
understanding of meaning) than the one Êiêek proposes, and should
approach its subject (including signiWcation) as a series of sometimes
unrelated, open processes that escape any unifying rule whatsoever,
even that of ideology (or of the unconscious). Such theory would be
open in the sense that it is no longer deWned as an ideological vortex,
in terms of the dichotomies inside/outside, whole/hole, void/content,
ideology/sign.12
From that position, a claim like Robert Pfaller’s—“Ideology does not
have an outside: the void is still an identity, and a ‘zero-interpellation,’
an ‘interpellation beyond interpellation,’ is still an interpellation” (241)—
comes across as wishful thinking. It sees the void the only way it can,
in terms of identity and as a marker of an empty place. The void may
not be any one thing, and if it were one, it could always be otherwise.
We can say much the same thing about the other two mantras men-
tioned at the beginning of this article. If our supposition is that ideology
is “the very condition of our experience of the world,” as Catherine
Belsey says (4), it is no wonder that knowledge is limited by ideology
and that we can understand our resistance to it (our “stepping out of
it”) only in its terms. The possibility that interpretation and ideology
might not coincide forces ideology to cede the horizon of thinking and
meaning to other, new forms of signiWcation (think of biology, of chem-
istry!) that are not deWned in reference to any notion of a whole Weld or
of the continuity. But to add anything else concerning what happens
when the domain of signs is no longer “coextensive” with (having
the same limits as) ideology would mean to offer yet another general
theory and pretend to be able to cover the Weld of signiWcation in its
entirety, which is precisely what cannot be done with any one theory.
It is, however, rather easy to predict the direction of further develop-
ment, since theory will have to concern itself with what are, at present,
excluded subjects. Biology and chemistry will have to be related to
signiWcation in some fashion. After all, when seen in a certain light,
biology and chemistry are but theories of communication. Similarly,
nature, which was foreclosed by recent theories of ideology, will, too,
have to be brought into conversation in some ways (ways other than
those that deal with “the end of nature,” which not by chance is the
title of Êiêek’s recent attempt to address environmentalism, published
as a New York Times op-ed). And, further, signiWcation will have to be
related to other humanoid formations to help us understand how
diversity (in terms other than multiculturalism, say, genetic diversity)
can exist within a species.
To put it another way, a theory of ideology that does not limit its
theory of interpretation looks much like a natural science, with the
proviso that a natural (or universal) science whose epistemology is a
theory of ideology looks much like poststructuralism should.
Petar Ramadanovic teaches literary theory at the University of New

Hampshire. He is the author of Forgetting/Futures and the editor of
Topologies of Trauma.
Notes
This essay is drawn from my book in progress, titled Beyond Ideology: Revisionist
Readings in Poststructuralism. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
comments and suggestions. Catherine Peebles provided the intellectual compan-
ionship that made it possible for me to formulate my ideas.
1. There are surprisingly few poststructuralist responses to Êiêek. Notable are
Judith Butler’s in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality and Colin Davis’s in Critical
Excess. Butler’s critique of Êiêek, however, afWrms the dominance of his Lacanian
view of signiWcation, where an open system of meaning is equated with one struc-
tured around an absence. See, for instance, her long explanation of Linda Zerilli’s
reading of Laclau (2000, 32ff.). In Adrian Johnston’s otherwise admirable Êiêek’s
Ontology, ideology does not even make it into the index of terms, deconstruction is
dealt with only in passing, style of writing is reduced to the issue of author’s inten-
tion, and so on. A promisingly titled collection, Ideology after Poststructuralism
(Maleševi� and MacKenzie 2002), does not live up to any part of its title.
2. By this I mean that works that focus on particular concepts or particular
aspects of Êiêek’s theory, Wne though they may be, are missing the point. This is
because, as we will see, Êiêek’s theory of ideology is there to secure a certain notion
of totality (in its very explanation of the theory of ideology) that holds all the par-
ticulars together. If we choose to change only an aspect of this theory, we are con-
Wrming the whole.
3. A notable exception is O’Neill 2001. O’Neill, however, does not take his
conclusions about the experience of reading Êiêek seriously enough, as integral to
Êiêek’s theories of interpretation and ideology.
4. Because I will not deal with belief again, I will comment on it here: in On
Belief, Êiêek argues, for instance, that a certain political position is “authentic in the
sense of fully assuming the consequences of [its author’s] choice, i.e., of being fully
aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it” (4). But what it means
to take power and to exert it is, in a characteristic Êiêekian move, left beyond dis-
cussion. The claim thus seems to be merely a declaration of Êiêek’s belief in politics
as a version of Lacan’s notion of the act. I understand, then, that the fundamental
goal of such politics is to maintain Lacan’s notion of the act.
5. The inXation of the term “ideology,” its loss of meaning, is an aspect of this
diffusion, as Laclau notes at the beginning of his “Death and Resurrection of the
Theory of Ideology.” I would not, however, endorse the rest of that essay, the thesis
of which is that the “double movement found in its most extreme form in mysti-
cism—that is, incarnation and deformation of particular contents through the expan-
sion of equivalential logics is at the root of all ideological process—political ideologies
included” (315). The most immediate reason for my reservation is that all meaning
is based on some form of equivalence. That something means implies that it can be
brought into a relation of equivalence with something else, and we don’t need to
implicate extreme mysticism to arrive to that insight.
6. Vološinov’s understanding that “an idea is just as sensory as matter” (11)
draws on Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
7. For Dean, the problem is that Êiêek’s mastery “elides the speciWcity of
art” (23).
8. In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Êiêek deWnes the process as depend-
ing on a crucial distinction between latent thought and “the unconscious desire
which inscribes itself through the very distortion of the latent thought into the dream’s
explicit texture” (191). This play of the three elements or layers of meaning, manifest/
latent/desire, is the reason why a critical method (which focuses on the difference
between manifest and latent) has to be supplemented with discourse analysis as a

tool to identify and interpret the unconscious grounding of ideology. Êiêek makes
a similar point in his Wrst essay in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, focusing
this time on the precise historical moment at which certain forms emerge (105).
9. The comparable effect of reading Êiêek is captured well by Edward O’Neill.
O’Neill speaks, unfortunately in frustration, of “a dizzying array of wildly enter-
taining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies . . . deployed in order to
beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and gener-
ally subdue the reader into acceptance. Example after example is supplied, but the
principle that makes them examples is not itself given. Appeals are implicitly made
to Lacan’s authority but the source of that authority is never mentioned. The truth
of Lacan’s theories is urged by showing how other people’s theories support that
truth but without explaining why these theories have the same object. One concept is
deWned in terms of another, which is then deWned in the same way, ad inWnitum” (7).
10. Êiêek repeats the same phrase several times in the essay, always with the
sense of a compulsion behind ideology, “the very gesture of stepping out of ideol-
ogy pulls us back into it” (1994, 10). On p. 13, the term is “regression”—“What we
encounter here again is the ‘regression’ into ideology at the very point where we
apparently step out of it.” On p. 17, just after a deWnition of the theory of ideology
is given, the trap is, interestingly, identiWed as the “last” one.
11. See, for instance, Judith Butler’s presentation of Êiêek’s argument in
“Restating the Universal,” where she singles out incompletion as the term of con-
tention between her and Êiêek (Butler, Laclau, and Êiêek 2000, 12). She goes on to
afWrm the points of agreement, all stemming from a common source, which is a
“Gramscian notion of hegemony” (13), based on the shared spatial model of ideol-
ogy, with an inside and an outside, an empty place or an absence at its center.
12. On this reading, in a passage like the following one, the word “perhaps”
becomes pivotal for Derrida’s understanding of Lacan: “Question of the letter, ques-
tion of the materiality of the signiWer: perhaps it will sufWce to change a letter,
perhaps even less than a letter, in the expression manque à sa place [lack in its place,
missing from its place], perhaps it will sufWce to introduce into this expression a
written a, that is, an a without an accent mark, in order to make apparent that if the
lack has its place [manque a sa place] in this atomistic topology of the signiWer, if it
occupies a determined place with deWned contours, then the existing order will
not have been upset: the letter will always re-Wnd its proper place, a circumvented
lack (certainly not an empirical, but a transcendental one, which is better yet, and
more certain), the letter will be where it always will have been, always should have
been, intangible and indestructible via the detour of a proper, and a properly circu-
lar, itinerary. But we are not there yet” (1987, 425).
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NO PLACE LIKE IDEOLOGY (ON SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK): IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE

THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF INTERPRETATION?

For Emil Hrvatin, a.k.a. Janez Jan�a

A cross literary studies, the accepted view is that ideology is not

Cultural Critique 86—Winter 2014—Copyright 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota

a ‘zero-interpellation,’ an ‘interpellation beyond interpellation,’ is still

“The Spectre of Ideology,” which introduces his collection Mapping

thing analyzed, ideology and the theory of ideology, continually ex-

neo-Marxists after World War II organized their theory of ideology

ideology is no longer concentrated but is distributed over a widening

critic in a position of hermeneutic mastery over the social and cultural

I cannot fully agree with Dean, because in Êiêek’s work mastery is a

In order to combat these new forms of organicist populism effectively one

As a result of self-scrutiny, both the concept of ideology and we who

assumed by critical theory (a self-constituted subject), Êiêek adds the

The unwillingness to disclose the hidden mechanism or the rule

The more pervasive device in Êiêek’s writing is a kind of sleight of

a kind of exuberant or exorbitant style shared by many French authors

The point of writing is to subvert or challenge the speaking posi-

As a sort of culmination of the experience, after we have tangled our-

If this is the case, if the reality-ideology structure is continuous

is a temporary signiWer, there is also a temporary completion and its

negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture

Derrida’s “Facteur de la vérité” concerns the materiality of the signi-

Petar Ramadanovic teaches literary theory at the University of New

between manifest and latent) has to be supplemented with discourse analysis as a

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